Gilbert Ryle's Concept of Mind

I'd call this a book review, but I haven't finished the book yet. I am enjoying it though, so I thought I'd write a few words about some of the more relevant themes.

Just chilling, no doubt reading some Wittgenstein

As I mentioned last time, it was Gilbert Ryle who coined the term "ghost in the machine" to refer to the disembodied mind that cognitive science seems intuitively drawn towards. The Concept of Mind is to a large extent aimed at dispelling this intuition, but along the way it also touches upon a number of other fascinating topics. Below is a list of ideas that Ryle either introduces, expands upon, or pre-empts:

• "Knowing How and Knowing That": This is the title of a whole chapter, wherein he draws a conceptual distinction between the two kinds of knowing. In brief, the first is the skilful execution of an action, the second the reliable recollection of a fact. The "intellectualist legend", according to Ryle, makes the former subordinate to the latter, in that all activities are reduced to the knowledge of certain rules (32). That this reduction is false is fundamental to his broader point - there is no isolated realm of the mental, and all cognitive activity must be expressed through action (or at least the potential for action).
• Embodied cognition and the extended mind: In the same chapter, he devotes a few pages to the common notion that thinking is done "in the head" (36-40). This notion, he argues, is no more than a linguistic artefact, stemming from the way we experience sights and sounds. Unlike tactile sensations, sights and sounds occur at some distance from our body, and so when we imagine or remember them, it makes sense to highlight this distinction by saying that they occur 'in the head'. By extension thought, which Ryle conceives of as internalised speech,¹ is also said to occur 'in the head'. However this idiomatic phrase is just metaphorical, and there is no reason that thinking should (or could) occur exclusively in the head.
• "The Will": Another chapter, this time de-constructing our understanding of volition and action. Suffice to say, Ryle thinks we've got ourselves into a terrible mess, in particular in supposing that to do something voluntarily requires some additional para-causal spark. Rather, to describe an action as voluntary is simply to say something about the manner in which, and circumstances under, it is performed. Free will, under this reading, is something to do with the kind of causal mechanism involved, rather than anything 'spooky' or non-physical.² Personally I've never found this kind of account particularly convincing, but it is nonetheless influential to this day.
• Higher-order thought as a theory of consciousness: Although he never explicitly puts it this way, there is a passage where Ryle describes how some "traditional accounts" claim that what is essential for consciousness is the "contemplation or inspection" of the thought process that one is conscious of (131). This is very similar to contemporary 'higher-order' theories of consciousness (see Carruthers 2011). Ryle doesn't exactly approve, dismissing such theories as "misdescribing" what is involved in "taking heed" of one's actions or thoughts.

So there you have it: Gilbert Ryle, largely forgotten but by no means irrelevant. As you may have noticed, a lot of his ideas influenced Daniel Dennett, which isn't surprising, seeing as Dennett studied under Ryle at Oxford.

1. This, perhaps, is one source of Dennett's fable about the origins of consciousness (1991).
2. Again, this is reminiscent of Dennett (2003).
 

References

• Carruthers, P. "Higher-order theories of consciousness." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2011/entries/consciousness-higher [21.12.2012]
• Dennett, D. 1991. Consciousness Explained. Little, Brown & Company.   
• Dennett, D. 2003. Freedom Evolved. Little, Brown & Company.   
• Ryle, G. 1949. The Concept of Mind. Hutchinson. 

Humans > Computers

I'm going to use this post to discuss a couple of related topics. First up, AI/robotics and a recent development reported here. Then, human-computer interfaces and the embodied cognition paradigm.

Disconcerting, to say the least.

Nico (pictured above), developed by a team at Yale University, is apparently going to be able to recognise itself in a mirror, and is already able to "identify almost exactly where its arm is in space based on [a] mirror image" (New Scientist, 22.08.12). This may not sound like much, but the so-called mirror test is a key psychological experiment used to demonstrate self-awareness. Only a few non-human animals are able to recognise themselves in mirrors (including, off the top of my head, chimps, elephants, and dolphins), whilst in human children it forms a key stage in normal cognitive development (usually at around 18 months). So making a robot that is able to pass this test would be a major development in AI research. 

It's impressive stuff, but what's particularly interesting is how they've programmed it to do this. According to this article, the robot compares feedback from its own arm movements with visual information from its 'eyes', and determines whether or not the arm that it is seeing belongs to it by checking how closely these match. This use of the robot's body to carry out cognitive tasks fits well with the enactive model of vision, whereby we learn about the world through moving and acting in it. It's certainly an improvement on previous models of AI research, which have tended to focus on 'off-line' solutions, forming representations and computing a response based on these. By harnessing elements of our environment (which includes our own body), both we and robots like Nico are able to minimise the cognitive and computational load compared with purely representational solutions. (See Clark 2003 for an accessible discussion of such 'off-loading' strategies.)

This kind of research is very exciting, and self-representation is certainly an important step in developing truly intelligent AI, but it strikes that by focusing on one specific problem like this, researchers risk missing the overall picture. It's all well and good designing a robot that can recognise itself, and another robot that can traverse rough terrain, and yet another robot that can recognise visual patterns, but we'll only start getting truly impressive results when all these abilities are put together. I'm convinced that some elements of human cognition are emergent, only appearing once we reach a critical mass of less advanced capabilities, and how this occurs might not become apparent until we've achieved it. Designing and programming solutions, in advance, for absolutely everything that we might want a robot to do just isn't feasible. Intriguingly Nico seems to have been originally designed to interact with children, which I'll admit is more promising. There's nothing wrong with tackling AI problems in isolation, we just have to remember that eventually we should be looking toward forming these solutions into a coherent whole.

More on this below...

Which leads me, somewhat tenuously, to my next topic. Anderson (2003: 121-5) discusses some interesting proposals from Paul Dourish concerning the future of human-computer interfaces (i.e. the way in which we interact with and make us of computers). For the last century this has largely been constrained by the limitations of the computers, meaning that how we interface with them has not always been ideally suited to our human limitations. The difficulties which many people find with even the simplest computer task attest to these limitations. Research in both 'embodied' AI and embodied cognition is beginning to suggest some alternative ways in which human-computer interfaces might be designed.

As an example of one such alternative Anderson gives the "marble answering machine", which I believe Clark (2003) also discusses. This machine, illustrated above, functions just as a regular answering machine does, but instead of an electronic display or automated message, it releases a different marble for each message recorded. Each marble is unique, and returning it to the machine elicits the playback of the particular message that it represents. Thus, in a very tangible and intuitive way, the user is able to keep track of their messages by handling, even removing, the physical marbles. Similar interfaces could be imagined for many other simple computers (for that is all an answering machine is), or could even be scaled up to the complexity of a desktop PC or laptop.

Here an Anderson makes an interesting contrast between this "tangible computing" and another direction that human-computer interfaces might take: virtual reality (2003: 124). He views the latter as being distinctly unfriendly to humans, drawing them in to the world of the computer as opposed to drawing the computer out in to the world of the human. I think there's room for both approaches, but this seeming dichotomy between the two worlds, one physical and one virtual, is certainly a striking image. What's also striking is the continued interaction between embodied cognition, robotics and AI, and computing, and just how fruitful it can be for all concerned. Once again I am struck by the hugely positive potential for interdisciplinary co-operation, particularly when it comes to philosophy and cognitive science.
 

• Anderson, M. 2003. "Embodied Cognition: A Field Guide." Artificial Intelligence 149: 91-130.
• Clark, A. 2003. Natural Born Cyborgs. Oxford: OUP.

Mary the Embodied Colour Scientist

(Being the techno-wiz that I am, I've worked out how to add additional authors to the blog. So who's written what should now be both more obvious and less obtrusive...this is Joe, by the way.)

"Mary the Colour Scientist" is a classic thought experiment, originally formulated by Frank Jackson (1982; 1986). For those unfamiliar with it, it goes something like this:

Mary has been raised from birth in an entirely monochrome environment, although she has been provided with a wealth of scientific data on colour and colour perception. She is in fact the world expert in the field, despite having never seen colour. For the purposes of the experiment, we are asked to assume that she knows all there is to know about the physical process of colour perception. What happens when she is released into the world? The thought is that she must learn something about what colours look like, despite already knowing all the physical information about colour and colour perception. Thus, there is more to experiencing colour than just the physical process, and therefore physicalism is false.

Monochrome

There's been a huge quantity of debate about this experiment over the years, and I don't intend to discuss much of it now. Most of the replies can be found in an anthology, There's Something About Mary (2004). What I want to discuss is a potential response, from the perspective of embodied cognition, which I don't think has been discussed in any detail before.

Jackson asks us to imagine that Mary knows all that there is to know, scientifically speaking, about colour. Ignoring the fact that the sheer weight of this claim is often underestimated¹, we might want to challenge his interpretation of what this in fact means. He assumes that a fully-detailed factual knowledge of colour perception will necessarily, if physicalism is correct, grant Mary knowledge about what colour looks like. On a traditional understanding of cognition, this seems to be a fair assumption. Knowledge, including phenomenal knowledge, is just in the head, and if we knew how colour perception worked, we would be able to imagine what it would be like to have such perceptions. This is the kind of cognitive materialism that was Jackson's original target, and given those assumptions his experiment can seem fairly convincing. My opinion used to be that we had just failed to grasp what truly complete knowledge of colour perception would be like, and that, contra Jackson, Mary in fact wouldn't learn anything knew when she perceived colour for the first time.

However, another possibility has now occurred to me. What if experiencing colour were to be more accurately conceived as an embodied phenomenon, involving not just the brain, but also the visual system and other physiological responses?² If this were the case, then scientific knowledge of colour perception just wouldn't allow for phenomenal knowledge of what colour looks like. Such knowledge would necessarily be impossible to acquire without actually seeing colour, and not because of any non-physical quality, but simply because that's how colour perception works. Once we shift our focus from the brain to the body as a whole, this seems pretty obvious.

A related kind of response has been made previously, that what Mary acquires when she first sees colour is knowledge, but knowledge of a different kind to that which the scientific understanding of colour perception granted her. Harman (1990), Flanagan (1992), and Alter (1998) all make arguments of this kind. What the perspective of embodied cognition adds to these kinds of responses is a principled stance from which to argue that there is more to knowledge and experience than what goes on in the brain. A more extreme response would be to deny that visual knowledge is ever possible without a world to perceive,³ in which case we would simply deny one of Jackson's original premises, that Mary has total scientific knowledge of colour perception. Such knowledge might not be acquirable without actual experience of colour. This might seem like a cheap way out, but scientifically implausible thought experiments can't easily be given scientifically plausible responses. Once you start discussing things that can't actually happen in the real world, the need to give you a real answer sometimes becomes moot.

1. A problem which pervades many thought experiments of this kind. Whenever you're asked to consider a situation where someone has total physical knowledge of a situation, be wary. Such knowledge is way beyond the reach of current science, and might simply be impossible for any human to comprehend. I often feel that the best response to such experiments is a cautious "I don't know what that would be like, so let's withhold our judgement".
2. There's a secondary issue here, which to my knowledge has not been satisfactorily resolved. After a lifetime of monochrome experience, Mary might in fact be totally unable to perceive colour. Experiments on sensory privation during visual development suggest that, at best, her perception of colour would take a while to develop, and might never quite reach 'normal'. Oversimplifications of this kind haunt many otherwise powerful thought experiments. 
3. Gibson's ecological theory of perception, discussed at length by Rockwell (2005), might entail something like this.

• Alter, T. 1998. “A Limited Defense of the Knowledge Argument.” Philosophical Studies 90/1: 35–56.
• Flanagan, O. 1992. Consciousness Reconsidered. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Harman, G. 1990. “The Intrinsic Quality of Experience." Philosophical Persepctives 4, Action Theory and Philosophy of Mind: 31–52.
• Jackson, F. 1982. "Epiphenomenal Qualia". Philosophical Quarterly 32: 127–136.
• Jackson, F. 1986. "What Mary Didn't Know". Journal of Philosophy 83: 291–295.
• Ludlow, P., Nagasawa, Y. & Stoljar, D. (eds.) 2004. There's Something about Mary: essays on phenomenal consciousness and Frank Jackson's knowledge argument. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

More Ranting on Relativism: Chemero on Clark's “Being There”

-->

(by Jonny)

A couple of weeks ago I posted about a problem that occasionally surfaces in philosophy of cognition, particularly embodied cognition. It's the problem of relativism. It's a problem, in my eyes, because it's an unnecessary obstacle for certain very intuitive ideas to become acceptable to many people, it's a distraction. Though the notion an organism's experience of the world is necessarily dependent on contingent sensorimotor capacities is highly plausible, though the notion that the way the world is largely relative to our particular bodily form, and that form's contingent interaction with the world makes some immediate sense, relativism is off-puttingly problematic.

Well I recently came across an example of this sort of view in the form of Chemero's (1998) review of Andy Clark's “Being There” (1997). Chemero, who otherwise positively recommends Clark's embodied conclusions, complains of the author's unwillingness to accept that his thesis implies a rejection of “world-it-itself”, of “scientific realism”.

Andy Clark's "Being There"

The precise reason remains a mystery to me. Chemero seems sensible when he says,

“Since there is no central executive in mobots with connectionist brains, there will be no detailed, action-neutral representation of the world. In most cases, agents will use the world as its own model. ” (pg.3)

And it sensibly follows from the central ideas of embodied cognition that,

“we should expect creatures (including humans) to be sensitive only to those aspects of their environments that matter to the actions they regularly undertake... The world represented by animals with much different needs than humans will be much different than the world humans represent.” (pp.5-6)

But it does not seem to follow that there is no world “in and of itself” independent of our perceptions. One of the issues seems to be Chemero's notion of what realism exactly says. He writes that falsehood of we must reject “so-called "common-sense realism," in which the world-in-itself is thought to correspond to everyday human categories. ” But it is ambiguous what he means by everyday human categories. Perhaps, as I mentioned in my last post, we will have reject the idea that the world is conveniently structured as our thoughts are structured. The world as constituted by giraffes and cactus and melons is a contingent, human perception of the world based on human needs, but it does not imply that the existence of giraffes is entirely relative. There is still something about the giraffe that exists independent of an organism's contingent situation. So perhaps we will reject a certain everyday realism, a realism that takes the world to always conform to everyday human categories, but this is a weak realism.

Though Chemero is right to say that “physics and other sciences depend upon our language-using abilities” (pg.7), he is wrong to conclude that science does not tell us something, in some form, about the real independent properties of the universe. 

Embodied cognition does not entail, and should not imply, this sort of radical relativism.

How I feel when I start thinking about cognitive science and relativism.

Chemero, A (1998) A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Humans: Review of Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again by Andy Clark. Psyche, 4(14)

Clark, A (1997) Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again. MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts

Embodied Ethics

(by Joe, with credit to Marc Morgan at Trinity College Dublin for inspiring some of these thoughts. Marc is a contributor at socialjusticefirst.)

I used to think that the majority of actions were morally neutral, and that only those things that caused harm or suffering could be classified as 'bad'. In and of itself I wouldn't have said that lying was wrong, or sleeping good. Only when coupled with contingencies such as the lie being malicious, or the sleep necessary to rejuvenate the mind and body, could these things be considered in any way moral. My practical ethics are still largely consequentialist, but I've been reconsidering how I classify things within that framework.

A body.

When it comes to practical, applied ethics (certainly the most important kind of ethics), we need to look at everything in context. Whether an action is good or bad, whether it causes harm, will depend on so many contingent factors that it is extremely difficult to make accurate ethical judgments in advance. The best we can hope for is to establish guiding heuristics that will help us to make moral decisions in the future. With that in mind, let's return to the classic example of lying.

As I mentioned above, I used to say that lying was only immoral if it caused harm. That's still basically what I think, only now I'd be tempted to expand harm to include more subtle effects like the degradation of the liar's moral character, and the long-term instability of a relationship build on deception. So whilst in the abstract lying might be morally neutral, in practice it could almost always wrong. Of course there are going to be exceptions, such as if you're sheltering a refugee from a murderous band of thugs, but my moral compass is beginning to swing distinctly towards the "lying is usually wrong" side of things. 

We could call this kind of approach "embodied ethics", in that it emphasises the "in the world" nature of moral judgments. Another sense in which ethics should be considered embodied is that it is very much a product of our evolved and biological nature. To a large extent, things are essentially right or wrong to the degree that they facilitate a way of life that is guided by our evolution. Just to be clear, I'm not saying that everything we've evolved to do is inherently right, but only that evolution has guided the way in which we make ethical considerations, as well as defining the things that matter to us. So ethical discourse must be underwritten by an understanding of our biological, embodied nature.

Finally, ethics is embodied because the mind and the self are embodied. As I've written about elsewhere, the potential for the extension of the mind and perhaps even the self has serious ethical implications. More generally, an understanding of morality demands an understanding of the mechanics behind the human mind, and an understanding of how it interacts with the world. Otherwise our ethics will be too abstract to be meaningful - this is why the ethical debates that philosophers sometimes have can seem so odd and out of touch. I'm still working on the full details, but from now on I'm going to try and make sure that my ethical theorising is firmly embodied, in all three of the ways that I've outlined here.

The Invisible Self

(by Joe)

"What am I? Tied in every way to places, sufferings, ancestors, friends, loves, events, languages, memories, to all kinds of things that obviously are not me. Everything that attaches me to the world, all the links that constitute me, all the forces that compose me don't form an identity, a thing displayable on cue, but a singular, shared, living existence, from which emerges - at certain times and places - that being which says "I." Our feeling of inconsistency is simply the consequence of this foolish belief of the permanence of the self and of the little care we give to what makes us what we are."

My copy of the book looks like this.

There is a muddy area where my philosophical research and my political beliefs meet, and the above quote, from The Coming Insurrection (Invisible Committee, 2009: 31-2), sums it up nicely. The Coming Insurrection was written in 2007 by an anonymous collective (calling themselves 'The Invisible Committee') based in France, and it is clearly strongly influenced by the philosophy of that country, most notably the situationist movement of the 1960's, but also continental philosophy more broadly. It is pompous, vague and quite rightly criticised by many in the left-libertarian circles that I inhabit - Django over at Libcom described it as "a huge amount of hyperbole and literary flourish around some wafer-thin central propositions". Nonetheless, the approach towards the self expressed in the above extract appeals to me. 

Put very crudely, I think that the self is an illusion or an abstraction, a "narrative center of gravity" that helps guide our lives and our interactions with others (Dennett, 1992). The mechanisms behind this formation of the self have evolved for a reason, and for pragmatic reasons we shouldn't strive to eliminate it entirely, but to focus on it too much is unhealthy and unhelpful. Such a focus has, since the enlightenment, led to a heightened sense of individualism throughout the western world, one which I think is at the heart of our capitalist, consumerist and ultimately selfish culture. We can overcome this individualism by studying what the self truly is, and perhaps eventually realising that it doesn't truly exist. 

There is an obvious link with Buddhist philosophy here, one which I am currently trying to learn more about. There is also a somewhat less obvious link with embodied cognition, and in particular the extended mind hypothesis (Clark & Chalmers, 1998). If the self is an illusion constructed by our mind, and that mind is embedded in, or even extended into, its environment, then the self can be thought of as a product of that environment. This could have quite serious consequences, not only for metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, but also for ethics and political philosophy.

Which brings us back to The Coming Insurrection. In the passage I quoted, they describe the sense of "inconsistency" that we feel when we realise that whilst the self is composed of our interactions with things in the world, those things "obviously are not me". The self is invisible, and however hard we try to look for it we can never find it. David Hume expressed a similar feeling when he wrote that "I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception"(A Treatise of Human Nature: Book 1, Part 4, Section 6). We are what we do, and what we do is interact with the world. The focus on the individual over the last few hundred years has clouded that fact, and created an entity, the solid, 'real' self, that does not in fact exist. In coming to understand that who we are is so heavily dependent upon who others are, I hope we might eventually be able to learn to behave more compassionately and co-operatively with other people, as well as with our non-human environment. Satish Kumar embodies this hope in the phrase "You are, therefore I am" (Kumar, 2002), a play on Descarte's "I think, therefore I am", itself a perfect slogan for enlightenment individuality.

There is also an element of the absurd that is recognised, I think, by both Hume and the Invisible Committee. We are confronted with on the one hand an unshakable conviction in the existence of the self, and on the other with convincing evidence that no such thing exists. Similar absurdity can be found in our struggles with free will, moral realism and even scepticism about the external world. In each case a pragmatic route must be found, one that allows us to go on, but at the same time acknowledges the truths that we have learned about the world. In the case of the self, I think that this means accepting that we are a lot closer to the world around us than our privileged, first person view-point makes it seem, and that in order to survive in such a world we must understand and respect our place in it.

There's a lot more I'd like to say about a lot of things here, but I'll save it for future posts. Otherwise we might get complaints about the lack of monkeys!

Here you go.

Clark, A. & Chalmers, D. 1998. "The Extended Mind." Analysis 58: 7-19.

Hume, D. 1739.  A Treatise of Human Nature. Book 1, Part 4, Section 6: Of Personal Identity.

Dennett, D. 1992. "The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity."

Invisible Committee, The. 2009. The Coming Insurrection. Los Angeles, LA: Semiotext(e). 

Kumar, S. 2002. You Are Therefore I Am: A Declaration of Dependence. Totnes, UK: Green Books.

Minding the Abyss: World Building without radical relativism

(by Jonny)

In their influential book “The Embodied Mind” (1991) Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch made a pioneering journey through many of the themes that the contemporary field of embodied cognition continues to spend a great deal of its resources exploring. One theme that hasn’t caught on in the same way that, say its emphasis on ecological perception has, is the notion that there is no pre-existing world with a given set of properties, a rejection of the “realism” that pervades most contemporary “analytic philosophy”. They express a position which takes the idea of embodied action, that the way in which we make sense of the world is necessarily dependent on contingent sensorimotor capacities, to imply that a perceiver-dependent world is an incoherent notion. Instead, it is perceivers who build worlds out of their contingent physical circumstances. The authors contend that the thesis of embodied mind leads us to believe that are no properties out there in the world independent of perceivers, that there is no independent or objective world.

Clearly published in the 90s...

Varela et al seem to believe that embodied cognition must tell us something profound about the metaphysical nature of reality. Yet it seems to me that this belief is an unnecessary chasm-leap of logic, one which if taken too seriously threatens the much more mundane claims of this research project. The jump seems to be this: why does the fact that perception is dependent upon action (in turn dependent on a contingent physical apparatus) imply that the world has independent, given properties. Why does the fact that our own knowledge of the world depends on the our particular and happenstance bodily form, imply that the world does not exist prior to our particular and happenstance knowledge of it? Such radically relativist theories about the metaphysic of the world do not seem to me to follow.  Andy Clark nicely reflect the worry about relativism’s unnecessary influence.

This high tech diagram I just stole from the internet has little to do with what we're talking about and probably won't help. ( http://www.unc.edu/~megw/TheoriesofPerception.html ) 

“Varela et al. use their reflections as evidence against realist and objectivist views of the world. I deliberately avoid this extension, which runs the risk of obscuring the scientific value of an embodied, embedded approach by linking it to the problematic idea that objects are not independent of the mind. My claim, in contrast, is simply that the aspects of real-world structure which biological brains represent will often be tightly geared to specific needs and sensorimotor capacities” (1997: 173).

Andy Clark. Nuff said.

“Continental  philosophy”, which I contend at this point in the history of ideas has more time for more radically relativaist theories, has influenced and continues to influence embodied cognition in a tolerant and healthy way that should continue. Yet undoubtedly the majority of research within embodied cognition still takes place within the tradition of “analytic philosophy”, which itself assumes a common sense realism, and whilst it is always healthy to question our paradigms, I believe we would be too quick to throw away the ever prudent belief in an world independent of perception.

Nevertheless, I believe relativist theories do teach the traditional analytic approach important lessons- lessons I believe Varela et al touch upon but take too far. The way human agents carve up the world is heavily shaped by theoretical-framework/s; our relative cultural, historical and physical context. Richard Rorty seems right in some sense when he says the concept of “giraffe” is ultimately contingent (1999: xxvi). It seems to me perfectly plausible that some alien species would not perceive the world as containing giraffes. Giraffes (organisms and their categorization) happen to be a useful object for us to conceptualise for obvious evolutionary reasons. However, this does not mean that there is nothing independent of our cognitive systems, independent of our descriptions, independent of our history, which allows us to pick out giraffes. We can learn from Rorty that for example “our linguistic practices are so bound up with our other social practices that our descriptions of nature… will always be a function of our social needs” without needing to agree that there is no underlying “dough” from which to cut out cookies (1999: 48). We can likewise learn from Varela et al that our contingent physical makeup must determine the way in which we perceive the world without needing claim that there is no world beyond our perception. 

Andy Clark (1997) Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together

Again. MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts

Rorty, R (1999) Philosophy and Social Hope Penguin: New York

Varela, F., Thompson, E. and Rosch, E. (1991). The embodied mind. MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts

Broadly Speaking: In Praise of (a particular) Functionalism

(by Jonny)

In “Philosophy and Flesh” (1996) George Lakoff and Mark Johnson give a clear and lucid introduction to the notion of the embodied mind, and what they see as its major implications. The book is very readable, let a little down by its claim to paradigm shattering originality and tendency toward over-generalisation. One particular point on which I found the authors to be a little confused was in their objection to 'functionalism'. The authors' basic point seems to be that the functionalism is misled in believing mind can be studied in terms of its cognitive functions whilst ignoring the role the body and brain has to play in those functions (75). For them functionalism is “essentially disembodied”,  a view where the mind “can be studied fully independently of any knowledge of the body and brain, simply by looking at functional relations among concepts represented symbolically” (78).

I think Lakoff and Johnson are too quick to jump the gun, too quick to dismiss a strong principle in their eagerness to overthrow the shackles of traditional “Anglo-American” assumptions (75). From my view, responsible functionalism never ignores anything which might reasonably thought of as contributing to the ultimate function of a mental state, and this must include the body and brain. Perhaps functionlism has a tendency to slip into to the impractically abstract, ignoring the very stuff that must be studied in order to understand function- but this is not necessarily so. The authors quote Ned Block saying, “The key notions of functionalism...are representation and computation. Psychological states are seen as systematically representing the world via a language of thought, and psychological processes are seen as computations involving these representations” (257). Yet to be functionalists we don't have to accept a Fodorian language of thought as the underlying force which must define a mental state's function, though even if we do, this will not and should not stop us ignoring the real world inputs and outputs dependent on the brain and body.

I think perhaps the authors of Philosophy and Flesh are conflating a narrow, abstract, empirically removed functionalism with a broad, scientifically informed version. Functionalism in the broader sense is simply the idea that what matters is what stuff does and as Dennett says functionalism construed this way “is so ubiquitous in science that it is tantamount to a reigning presumption of all science” (2006: 17). As he goes on to say, “The Law of Gravity says that it doesn't matter what stuff a thing is made of- only its mass matters...It is science's job to find the maximally general, maximally non-committal- hence minimal- characterization of whatever power or capacity is under consideration”(17-18). When it comes to the mind, functionalism makes the claim that it's not what the brain is made out of as such, but what that stuff does that matters. This does not ignore the stuff, it does not ignore the brain or body, but it does ask why the stuff matters. To quote Dennett one last time, “Neurochemistry matters because- and only because- we have discovered that the many different neuromodulators and other chemical messengers that diffuse through the brain have functional roles that make important differences” (19). In accepting the significance of the body in cognition, from the reliance of our particular sensori-motor apparatus to perception and conceptualisation to the importance of the body's interaction with its environment to reason, we do not need to reject broad, empirically responsible functionalism.

Dennett, D (2006) Sweet Dreams Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness MIT Press: Cambridge (MA)

Lakoff, G., Johnson, M (1996) Philosophy of the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its challenge to Western Thought Basic Books